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Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE (born May 27, 1922 in Belgravia, London)
is a legendary and prolific British actor known for his versatility and film
longevity.
Lee became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror
films. He is viewed by many as the quintessential film villain. Other
notable films include The Wicker Man and The Man with the Golden Gun. Lee is
now over 80 years old, and still appearing in films such as The Lord of the
Rings movie trilogy, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Star
Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
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Lee was born in London in 1922, the son of Geoffrey Trollope Lee, a
Lieutenant Colonel in the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corp, and the Marchesina
Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano, whose grandfather had been an Italian
political refugee who had sought refuge in Australia. His parents separated
when he was very young and his mother took Christopher and his sister Xandra
to Switzerland where Christopher was enrolled in Miss Fisher's Academy in
Wengen and he played his first villainous role as Rumpelstiltskin. The
family returned to London where Christopher attended Wagner's private school.
His mother then married Harcourt Rose, a banker and uncle of the James Bond
author Ian Fleming. He then attended Wellington College, where he won
scholarships in classics. He volunteered to fight for the Finnish forces
during the Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939 - though, as Lee
admits in his autobiography, he and his fellow British volunteers were in
Finland for a fortnight and kept well away from the Russian forces the whole
time - then served in the Royal Air Force and intelligence during World War
II. To this day he will not talk about what he did while in the RAF but
claims to know the sound a man makes when you stab him in the back and
puncture his lung.
In 1946 he gained a 7 year contract with Rank Organisation after discussing
his interest in acting with his cousin Nicoḷ Carandini, the Italian
Ambassador, who related to Lee that performance was in his blood as his
great grandmother Marie Carandini had been a successful opera singer in
Australia, a fact of which Lee was unaware. He made his film debut in
Terence Young's Gothic romance, Corridor of Mirrors, in 1948. Throughout the
next decade, Lee made nearly 30 films, playing mostly stock action
characters. His first film for Hammer, made in 1956 with his close friend
Peter Cushing, was The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played, "The
Creature". That led to his first appearance as the infamous Transylvanian
Count in the 1958 film Dracula (known as Horror of Dracula in the U.S.). Lee
would become indelibly associated with the role and with the horror genre,
making another six films as Dracula, five of them for Hammer, as well as
many other horror films.
Lee has played roles in over 220 films since 1948. He has had many notable
television roles. He appeared as Flay in the BBC television miniseries
Gormenghast, based on Mervyn Peake's novels.
As an indication to his prolificacy and longevity, Lee has, according to the
Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, an average Bacon number of 2.684104 (as of
December 2003), making him second on the list of most suitable centres of
the Hollywood universe. This calculation uses a modification of the Six
Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.
In 2001 Christopher Lee was appointed Commander of the Order of the British
Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.
In 2005 he played the role of Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński in the film: John
Paul the Second on CBS. |
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CHRISTOPHER LEE PICTURES |
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MOST POPULAR
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